Rambo: First Blood Part II (ENGLISH)

Rambo: First Blood Part II (Jerry Goldsmith). After the success of the first film, starring John Rambo, and of Jerry Goldsmith ‘s music, the second part counted again with the composer’s skills. The score for Rambo II contains a lot of action cues, with a new main theme, played by the wind metal, more focused in the action, against the main theme that Goldsmith composed for the first film, slower and melancholic, and witch the composer reuses in this second part in many times and formats, particularly for the most intimate moments of the story and, in other occasions, almost always adapted to identify the hero in the course of the action sequences.

For the story developed in Vietnam, and where the survival mission this time is forced by the protagonist, the musical focus changes radically. First Blood soundtrack was a drama-tinged action, where the protagonist was forced to fight an enemy who had attacked first without apparent cause. In this second part, Rambo is sent to Vietnam to gather information about possible American survivors of the war in that country and who might still be captive. Rambo initiates the action and that is why both the film and the music leave more aside the dramatic part to focus on the action of infiltration of former Green Beret, and where predominate the action cues and the use almost excessive of the synthesizer.

The soundtrack was first released in 1985 by Varèse Sarabande. In 1999, Silva Screen reissued the album in an expanded edition, which included a small booklet in which the 21 tracks coming commented one by one, and which warned of possible sound defects.
In 2016, Intrada reissued the soundtrack with a complete 2-disc edition that included many extras. Because of the origin of the masters of the original recording, the low quality of some tracks remains in the 2016 edition, especially on the extras of disc 2. But, beyond the commercial interest to republish the soundtrack, we must recognize Intrada the effort to improve the issues, looking for cues never before published and improving the sound quality to the extent of its possibilities.

The aforementioned edition of 2016 can be considered, as its content is concerned, as a collector's item rather than a complete standard soundtrack that treats to make justice publishing for the first time tracks previously unreleased. First, because such low quality tracks as some of those included on disc 2 could not be admitted if not for the curious of them. As the soundtrack was edited several times, there were few tracks that had not yet been released on CD before this edition, and the commercial interests in which Intrada puts the focus is on the extras, a fact that is demonstrated only see that the disc 2 is longer than the disc 1, in which the full score of the film is presented, and its content should be that witch supported the main interest. Another factor that leads to this issue to be considered a collector's item is the booklet itself. With generous photographic content, the information contained in it, instead of other complete editions, does not talk about the film, the director, the protagonist star, the process of composing music, nor includes the typical track-by-track analysis, but talking about the content of the publication itself, tracks retrieved and edited for the first time, as well as comments on the sound quality of some extras. All this information, rather technical, extends widely along the notes, and make an abnormal booklet for an issue whose publication perhaps may seem somewhat forced for the common fan, considering that almost all tracks in the score were published with the 1999 release of Silva Screen.

In any case, the extra content, the previously unpublished tracks, the Carolco logo music, the chronological order and improving the overall sound quality increases by far the value of this release compared to the 1999 edition, and make this version the definitive edition of the music from Rambo II.